advertentie
Bob the builder
The original area is 48m² which will be divided into 2 places. Each place is 4x6 meters (24m²) with 24x 400Watt SON-T plus high pressure natrium lamps. A total of 40m² offers space to 1000 cannabis plants under 48x 400Watt SON-T plus high pressure natrium lamps. More technical details will follow.
The planning
The creation of a growroom starts with the planning which can be split up in 3 parts:
1 Everything that is needed to turn the room into a good growroom.
2 The electrical installation
3 The growing method and the medium
The plan for the room
Think as a policeman or someone who is trying to find a hidden growroom with cannabis. Read the newspapers and pay attention to how people get caught while growing. At the moment a heat detecting camera is a dangerous weapon in the hands of the police. Make sure you have a normal warmth level on the sides of your growroom. Lighting up the road with light coming from inside your room is not a smart idea. This means: closing up. How? First place luxaflex in front of the windows. This way it looks normal from the outside. Behind the luxaflex you place black/white foil with the black side to the luxaflex. The window is now closed for any source of light. Now it is time to reduce the level of warmth on the walls and the window. By placing an extra wall with isolation materials, a normal warmth image is created.
The wall exists out of a wooden framework
filled with mineral isolation and covered with black/white foil on both sides. Now we are going to create the separating wall to split up the spaces. This one is made out of a wooden framework, filled with mineral isolation and covered with black/white foil. To enter and leave the growroom, a door is being installed.
Lightening
You can’t do anything with only empty spaces. You have to place lamps, cables and fans.
The light will exist out of 400 Watt Philips SON-T plus lamps. 24 lamps per place, assembled per 6 on a wooden plank of 5 meters. The distance between the reflectors is 80 cm. The reflectors are cheap dimpled reflectors. (in between: the angles of the reflectors are razor sharp. DON’T CUT YOURSELF!!!) Because they are only reflectors, the weight per wooden plank together with the reflectors is about 10 kg. With hooks attached to the ceiling and a white nylon wire, the height of the reflectors can be adjusted during the growing period.
The lights will be connected with 3x 1,5 mm² (less than 1,5 mm² is dangerous).
We will place silver connectors at the end of the stripped cable to ensure a good connection. The cables will be bound together with tie-raps. We keep these cables together on a safe place to prevent them from melting or making contact with a lamp. We connect blue – blue, red – yellow/green, brown – black on the reflectors. The bulbs get in later to prevent a possible crackdown. Now the rack can be assembled with the electricity where the ballast will be placed with the whole control system and the relais that are needed to switch from one room to the other.
Ballast
We assemble the ballast devices (from TRM)on a rack.
Most of the time you see ballast devices screwed on a wooden plank with a spaghetti of cables on every side. These growers are astonished when their growroom burns down. The rack has wheels in case we need to move it. The 24 ballast devices for the 2 growrooms will be first assembled. The head of the rack will serve as a plate to assemble strips, relais and electrical timers. Some assembled ballast devices are shown on the photos below.
After all the ballast devices are assembled, electric connections will be placed. These cables should be placed correctly from the start.
(If you do not have any experience in doing this, please invite someone who has the knowledge to do it without accidents!!!) The tension care to the ballast devices runs over a 16 Amp switch device. Per 16 Amp switch device are 6x 400 Watt ballast devices connected. The right side of the switch board is for the tension to the ballast devices and for the tension to the lamps. On the left side there will be cables that go to the lamps in the flowering rooms.
On the first picture on the left you can see the supervision for the 2 flowering rooms. The highest timer switches the lamps on for 12 hours in the first room and the next 12 hours the lamps in the second room. We will return to the function of the second timer on the 2 ballast devices later in the text. (They are for a different room.) The picture in the middle shows the connections of the cables that go to the lamps from the flowering room. The 12 relais switch per relais 2 lamps on or off. The relais are being controlled by the timer and if ratified they burn the lamps in flowering room 1. If not ratified the lamps in flowering room 2 will burn. On the picture on the right, the whole system is assembled and running.
Testing the lightning
Now that all the cables are attached to the rack with electronics and ballast devices, it is time to do some testing.
It’s always cool to turn on the switch devices the first time. If the automatic switch device turns back off, something is wrong. All 4 of them should stay on. It’s a big relief when everything is connected correctly. The room is a sea of light. First orange-red and then slowly it turns into the well known yellow colour. (The camera used to take the pictures oppresses this effect; there is an automatic white scale balance in it. In other words; the camera creates white by correcting the amount of yellow.)
If you turn 10 kW ( 10.000 Watt 24x 400 Watt HPS lamp ) electricity into light and warmth, a lot of heat needs to be extracted. You can hang a filter in your growroom, but when working with filters seized about 1,5 meters high, this is not so easy to do. That’s why we have chosen to install the filters outside the growrooms with fans on it. The aluflex has a diameter of 315 mm. The holes in the wall are 330 mm. The aluflex fits easily in the hole and PUR foam does miracles.
The fans on the right and in the middle are for the flowering space.
The fans have a capacity of 3250 m3 an hour, each. The air that comes out of the fans is being transported to the attic and then blown away from under the tiles. 3 hotboxes are used to blow pre-heated air (21 degrees Celcius) in the room.
The 3 hotboxes are placed inside a box so they can pre-heat air. The box is 1x1x0,5 (lxwxh) meters. The holes of the hotboxes to suck in the air have a diameter of 220 mm. The 320 mm holes are for the aluxflex which transports the pre-heated air to the growroom. Every hotbox has its own thermostat and has a set temperature of 21 degrees. The advantage of hotboxes in a box outside your growroom is that they are always within your reach, this assures that the air coming in your room is pre-heated. During the winter it has a small disadvantage. The humidity of the air decreases to 40%. To prevent this from happening we use a humidifier in the first weeks to increase the humidity to 65%. The hotboxes have their own fans so no smell can escape. Every hotbox has its own socket. This way you can turn off your hotboxes in the summer.
The size of the room is 24m².
The OSB plates have a seize of 2,5x1,25 meters. The OSB plates will be sawed in to pieces with a height of 10 cm and a length of 2,5 meters. The outside border has a height of 20 cm. The 10 cm high pieces will divide the surface into 5 units with a content of 400 litres each. To ensure that the foil (normally for ponds) with a cross-section of 1 mm doesn’t get damaged, another foil with a cross-section of 3 mm will be placed beneath the previous foil. To keep the second foil on the right place it gets taped with Duct Tape to the floor (everywhere). Now place the 1 mm previous foil (for ponds) in it.
The blue boxes that will contain the mapito will have 12 holes in the bottom with a diameter of 10 mm each. Each room will contain 125 of those boxes. 25 boxes in each unit. Now it’s time to fill the boxes with mapito. This is not a nice job because the mapito itches like crazy. Use ways to protect yourself (eyes and breathing ways). Use an overall and disposable gloves. When the boxes are filled and placed, they get flushed with water for a while. Mapito is normally a waste product of horticulture. By flushing you wipe out the residues that are left behind in it. Measure your EC until you have an EC of 0,5 and most of the residue is gone.
Now the room is ready for the little ladies.
In each blue box, 4 hemp plants will be placed. Genetics; Chronic. In total there will be 500 cannabis plants needed (clones).
If you work with clones, make sure they are fresh and not too big. This is obvious to notice. The leaves should be tight and shiny green. The roots should be white and with a lot of hair on it. If the roots are brown or if the leaves are weak, it will cost a week to get them back to normal.
Like said before, the mapito is now watered with a nutrient solution 1,3 and a root stimulator with a pH of 5,4.
Now we divide 4 clones in each blue box. By working line by line you make it easier for yourself and you will have less chance to forget something.
The clones will be put into the mapito until the end of the plug is at the same level as the mapito.
Now they receive nutrients from beneath every 3 days.
In the beginning the small plants take up to 25 ml each day. Later this will increase until 500 ml a day. The first 2 days the lamps will hang 1 meter above the little cannabis ladies. There will be no vegetative stage. The ladies have to work right from the start. No bullshitting, but growing!
How to cultivate
The medium is mapito. The nutrients are from HESI.
The following products are being used:
- HESI hydro growth, HESI hydro bloom, HESI SuperVit, HESI ph- growth, HESI ph- bloom, HESI PK 13/14, HESI root stimulator and a lot of water. The growing schedule is very simple. The first 10 days the plants receive HESI hydro growth with an EC of 1,3 and a pH of 5,6 with root stimulator. The other 7 weeks we use HESI hydro bloom with an EC of 1,3 and a pH of 5,8. In week 5 we give PK 13/14 as being told on the label of the nutrient. From the start of the cultivation, the cannabis plants receive HESI SuperVit as said on the HESI growschedule and label. Now we wait until it’s time to harvest.
The harvest and the cutting
After waiting and taking care for 9 weeks, finally the time is there.
We can start harvesting and cutting the plants. Cutting is not the right word actually, because cutting takes to long with this amount of plants, we prefer to say shaving. We love shaved ladies. It is possible to walk on the blue boxes. First we start with the row in the middle, after that we take one on the right, then one on the left until all the plants are shaved. The white support gauze has a width of 2 rows of boxes.
Don’t think you can cut 500 plants with your hands… this costs too much time, about 40 hours, before you are finished.
It’s easier to use a machine, there are several cutting machines. We have chosen for this one because it is from RVS. Better to have quality than quantity. Inside the cutting machine, an electric engine ensures the leaves are being sucked into the cutter. Below, a knife is swinging around and cuts of the leaves. A nice bud stays behind.
Drying Drying grass can be done in several ways. In closets, with or without heater, with or without active carbon filter, dehumidifiers ... All the methods have 1 disadvantage. The grass never gets real tight and compact. Drying this way starts opening the flowers by dehydration. Think twice and use the multifunctional blue boxes to dry your grass. Let’s start working After shaving the flowers, we cut off the flowers from the main stem. The flowers disappear into the blue multifunctional boxes until they are filled. We place the filled boxes into an iron framework. A 300 m3/hour extractor is being placed above the boxes and turned on. Now 300 m3/hour is being sucked through the flowers. After 1 day the volume of the flowers is only half of they day before. Because there are 30 cm of buds pressed above each other, the ones below are nicely pressed together. Every day we turn the blue boxes around and fill them with fresh buds. This way the fresh material always presses the older material.By placing 5 boxes above each other, you can dry the harvest of 500 plants, at a temperature of 18 degrees Celcius, in 1 week time. The heater is on photo 1. The storage room is not heated. The heater keeps the temperature in the boxes on 18 degrees Celcius. Don’t go drying at a temperature of 25 degrees Celcius because that is bad for the quality and the chance for fungi is higher. Fungi grow explosively at a temperature above 18 degrees Celcius. After 1 week of drying and turning around the flowers, we still have 8 blue boxes filled with dry grass. One dry box of grass weighs…